Aidan McHugh, Gamedev @ Coatsink.
Brink of Extinction
A team project involving recreating a Golden Age arcade game for WebGL.
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A vertical slice created in Unity, a free and open-source game engine.
- Developed for a third year university module.
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C# was used for various coded elements in the game.
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I created the Enemy AI and Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment for the game.
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A five person project lasting roughly three months, from September 20th to December 31st.
Project Overview
Brink of Extinction was a single player vertical slice created as a team to fulfil a brief of recreating a Golden Age (1974-1984) arcade game in WebGL format. Our team settled on recreating Defender, a classic shoot-em-up where the player must shoot down various types of enemies and prevent humans from being captured by said enemies. I worked on the AI, based on an object-oriented Fixed State Machine, as well as the Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment, which would adapt to the player's performance to allow for a smoother transition of dififculty.
Project Challenges
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Working solely on AI for the first time was a brand new challenge, and required studying Fixed State Machines and AI independently.
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The creation of the Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment system required a separate written paper on DDA, covering the mathematics and models behind DDA systems.
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Other programmers on the team were faced with similar challenges of writing papers on specific complex features, which required strong communication and clear coding principles so teamwork could go smoothly.
Feedback
When reviewed by lecturers, the code was well received, with positive comments towards the gameplay mechanics. However, issue was taken with some implementations, such as with the rescue mechanic for saving humans from enemies, thereby making the game harder than expected. For this element, I received a mark of 60%, contributing to an overall grade of 68% for the module.
An academic paper I wrote on the game's DDA received a mark of 82%, with positive reactions to high quality code and arguments for how code was researched and implemented.
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